


dreams from a past life

by reylofics



Category: Donnie Darko (2001)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Schizophrenia, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-04-08 04:45:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14097513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reylofics/pseuds/reylofics
Summary: donnie can’t tell what’s real and what’s not.in other words, a reimagining of the last few events of “donnie darko”.





	dreams from a past life

**Author's Note:**

> a couple of things:  
> 1) this is set during the scene where frank is shot in this alternate sort of universe.  
> 2) i do believe that donnie did feel some sort of affection for gretchen, although i feel the movie portrayed it as a forced romantic attraction. in my mind, he had a strong friendship in mind with her, and she had an inkling of a romantic attraction for him, but ultimately, she would’ve been fine with just being friends. this is merely my opinion, but in this fic, donnie kind of tosses aside any attraction that he has for her and focuses it all on frank.  
> 3) donnie’s schizophrenia is heightened more in this fic to distinguish between fact and fiction.  
> 4) yes, i’m aware that there was no car present in this scene, and donnie had to retrieve the car keys from home before driving off. i included the car for convenience, because i’m too lazy to include a whole scene of donnie walking back home with frank and gretchen. which would be completely illogical. so.  
> 5) yes, i’m also aware that the following events are completely illogical. but yanno: creative expression and all that shit.  
> 6) and yes, i’m ALSO aware that there’s a minimal amount of relationship type of stuff in this. that’s intentional.  
> 7) i don’t know if this is an issue, but i didn’t know whether or not to tag “major character death”, considering that one of the main characters is already dead? oh, well.  
> 8) oh, hey. i just want to say thank you for reading this.

Splattered stains of a dark red color were thrown everywhere on the gravel, tainting the gray rocks with pools of innocent blood. The boy standing in front of it all could barely wrap his mind around the scene. Various thoughts—some related to the scene at hand and some not—raced through his mind at a puzzling pace, faster than he could stand to compete with. Trying to compete with his thoughts would only end up doing more damage than good, anyways. To make matters worse, the gun was still sitting in his dominant hand. Directly across from the person holding the gun, another frightened boy in a clown suit stood gaping in the shadows. His friend had fallen helplessly on the ground, circles of blood forming around his eye—the spot where Donnie Darko had shot him in a moment of weakness. Blood stained the edges of his face in a horrific manner. Lying in such a gruesome state, Frank looked just as Donnie had always imagined him to be. Mesmerized, Donnie glanced down at the gun in his hand as if he had just realized that it was there.

He quickly snapped out of it. “Get out of here!” he shouted to the boy in the clown costume, clearly enraged at the situation. Instantaneously, the boy in the clown suit followed his directions and fled the scene just as Donnie dropped the gun on the rocks below him. His knees buckled underneath, and he was no longer Donnie Darko. He was just a boy feeling sad and alone in this cruel world that seemed to take everything he had ever loved away from him.

Sobbing, he fell to the ground in the same way that Frank had so pathetically died. He covered the older boy’s right eye with his callous hand, mirroring the spot where he had shot Frank on his own body. Tears spilled down his cheeks as he caressed his eye tenderly, recalling the exact moment in time when he had directed the gun towards the boy in the rabbit costume and shot him without a second’s hesitation. Blinking rapidly, the previous events of the night shot through his mind like rapid fire. Suddenly, he wasn’t crying anymore. Staring down at his hands, Donnie Darko began to see similar blood stains trickling down from his own right eye.

“No.” He shook his wildly, hair flailing around his face. “This can’t be real,” he whispered to himself. “He’s the one who lost his eye,” said Donnie, alluding to Frank. “I-I shot him,” shrieked the boy, almost if he were trying to aimlessly convince himself that this was the truth. Once more, he shook his head and blinked. His hands were finally back to normal as they had been before. They were still stained, but with dirt instead of blood stains. In an odd sort of disbelief, Donnie Darko smiled to himself, convinced that his mind was merely playing silly tricks on him. After all, such was normal after experiencing a traumatic course of events. 

Looking at Gretchen, still a lifeless corpse on the ground, Donnie began to cry again. Looking up at the sky, he punched the air, yelling, “Fuck you, God!” 

Clenching his teeth tightly together, Darko stood up from his kneeling position on the ground and began to walk over to Frank. His facial features shifted blankly and for a few seconds, he stared at Frank’s mutilated face which was lit by the dazzling glow of the moon above. There was a giant hole on the right side of his face, blasted apart by the bullet from Donnie’s gun. Chunks of skin had flown off and joined the tiny pebbles on the ground. Darko was in awe of it all. 

Reaching forward, he gingerly touched the area surrounding the bullet hole, tugging off the spare pieces of skin. With his free hand, he tucked Frank’s flowing hair behind his ear in a neat fashion. In this way, Frank looked beautiful to Donnie Darko in a way that his girlfriend, Gretchen, never had. Smiling, he leaned forward and kissed the top of Frank’s forehead, just above the bloody hole in his face. The action seemed to calm him down immensely. “Perfect,” sighed the younger boy. In many ways, Frank looked like a bloody masterpiece of art created solely by Darko.

After admiring his masterpiece, Donnie grabbed Frank’s tender body—rabbit costume and all—and dragged him to the passenger’s seat of his car. Frank’s legs hung limply in Donnie’s hands, flinging everywhere. Dried blood flaked off of his skin as he was dragged to car and stuffed in the seat next to Donnie’s.

In a sort of villainous trance, Donnie returned to fetch Gretchen from her dead state on the ground. For a second, he gazed lovingly at her but he shook himself quickly from this state of mind. Unlike with Frank, he did nothing to alter her blank appearance in death. Instead, he absentmindedly carried her in his arms and pushed her in the backseat of his car. Reaching around to the back of the car, he found a cover to toss over her dead body without a moment’s thought. He returned to the front of the car, also grabbing a pair of sunglasses from the driver’s side of the car to put over Frank’s mutilated eye.

Feeling content with his success of covering up the dead bodies, Donnie geared up the car’s engine. Every few seconds or so, he would glance at the car clock, muttering to himself what the time left was. He didn’t even know where or why he was driving, but he was aware of some small notion in the back of his mind that urged him to just keep driving into the sun. The few moments that he had left in this alternate sort of universe passed by quickly and the sky angrily cursed at the people down below. Mimicking the sky, Donnie growled lowly, laughing loudly in the security of his car. His hands gripped the steering tightly as the sky began to grow darker and swallow up reality. Within a matter of seconds, Donnie Darko traveled within the very depths and realms of time itself, bringing Gretchen and Frank back down with him. He closed his eyes tightly as his car flew into the hungry sky, awaiting his fate.

When he blinked his eyes wide open, he was back in his bed and it was October 2nd. Frank was the first person to enter his mind, swirling past all his dark, maniacal thoughts. 

A few houses down from the Darko house, Donnie Darko also invaded Frank Anderson’s midnight thoughts. For some odd reason that he couldn’t pinpoint, Frank felt as though he had some strange mutual attraction to Donnie—an attraction that should’ve been reserved for Elizabeth Darko, his girlfriend. In his dreams, he thought of Donnie—Donnie pushing his hair back behind his ear fondly, Donnie carrying him adoringly to his car, and Donnie kissing his forehead, just above his right eye. It was all too much for him.

Sweating profusely, Frank jolted awake and tenderly touched the imagined spot above his eye in which Donnie had kissed him in his dreams.

Back in the Darko household, Donnie Darko smiled to himself and kissed the broken lines of his right hand before being struck dead by a jet engine.

**Author's Note:**

> 9) oh, hey. thank you for reading this all.
> 
> update: this story was originally written on march 26th, 2018 but has since been edited!


End file.
